The State of Pong
by PaintingInTheAttic
Summary: Pong is a game harshly imposed. The characters are allowed no story, no identity, no history. Their freedom of movement is confined in nearly every way. Yet within such a regulated world, there is still room for resistance. This is a story of Left Paddle. Victim of the game, beneficiary of the resistance.


_With a furtive gesture to the past, the total regime laps hope from the down-trodden people._

* * *

When I was young, I used to hear stories about a time when stories were still legal. How in that time people could actually gather in public in large troves and be met with a story. Perhaps they might even participate in a story. People were still people then. The Universal Replacement for Language had not been created yet, and so people still had names and purposes. Purposes were so plentiful in fact, that my parents told me that they filled the very oceans themselves. In those times, it is said that you could construct a vessel granting you the power to surpass the depths of the great oceans. In doing this, purposes would swim up alongside you and patter back and forth with you. But such stories have no doubt been twisted by the onslaught of time.

Such stories came to me in fractured pebbles. I would hear them by pressing myself toward the far end of my enclosure until my presence could no longer show up on the Eternal Government's monitors. No longer being on their monitors which inform my life, I would for those short moments, in a way, cease to exist. I could no longer see myself, no longer sense myself, but it was worth it to be exonerated from the Eternal Government's view; even if but for a short while. It was there among the static that I would receive the intermittent packages of information which contained the stories. They came in small bits so as not to attract undue attention, yet I incorporated them into myself all the same. The depth of the stories became singular with who I was. Impossible to discern where they ended and I began.

My absorption of them altered the fabric of their construction. They came to me dry, discrete, unbelieved... being passed on for sake of knowledge and nothing else. It was I who gave them life. I received the stories, obliterated them with my unbuckling passion, and gave new birth to their narratives. The stories, by merit of being contained within me, reverberated with hope- a dewy eyed dream of futures which could only be described with words which the Eternal Government had long ago destroyed.

I was moved by these stories. Moved in a way that even the contemporary gatekeepers of the stories could not imagine. The resistance had set out to collect and evangelize a library of all possible data which would stand as a testament to true erudition. The Library of Sand was to host a collection of innumerable knowledge, its failure was to never see a story as anything more than one more grain in their desert. The stories they share are dead.

But once they were within me, once the stories were mine. They erupted.

* * *

The resistance can fight on all they want now. Perhaps they even have a chance of winning. It does not matter to one such as me. The oppression of the Eternal Government will only be replaced by the apathy of a new era. I do not need some outside authority or counter-authority to grant me liberation from my bondage. I am free within myself.

It may be that I can only retrace a single path, may only relive the same old stories, that my boldest escapes will lead only to places I've been before. I do not care. They may record all my thoughts, monitor my fluxes of emotion, censure me for the base circumstances of my existence, but I will not soil myself with fear. I know how fragile their tyrannous structures of thought are, I know that for all their shows of power the gentlest blowing of the wind could cause them to crumble in upon themselves. What a farce their projected invincibility is! As if they forget time. As if by pretending their reign had no beginning they can impose a world where it will have no end.

Eternity knows no stability. The world is chaos. It's strength is constantly being sapped by forces beyond comprehension. And so all orders must one day reveal their finite nature. The end is out there. It will consume the gods just as easily as it will consume me. Still I do not fear. I am a singularity. It matters not how many dimensions I may be confined and beaten down within. I'll always have the one in which I can reach off to the distances of infinity and resonate with boundless energy as I journey toward an unknowable climax all my own.

To the Eternal Government, it is true that I am no more than an insignificant single segment of line, but that is only a projection of myself into terms they understand. I care not what I may be or appear to be in their domain, I know all that I am in my own nature. I am more than could ever be seen by any of their monitors, I am connected to those around me by trails which could never be unearthed. I frolic upon pastures which they could not even conceive of. I feel beauty, hold love, balloon with fiery adventure. Even the resistance can scarcely approach these things on their native localities, let alone in the modes I interface with them.

Am I supposed to be discouraged? To resign myself to hopelessness? What ludicrous imaginings they must have of how one is supposed to carry out their life. I can receive more in the simple act of reflecting a ball back and forth than they could in a thousand lifetimes, each free from any and all constraint. I can achieve more paralyzed in time than they can with all the world open to study and all the agency to go out and explore it. Whatever acquiescence they intended to implant in me has taken no roots. Nor could it ever grow within the fervor of my existence. All the limitations on me have only helped to define what I'm not. I learned from them to look for places where the complement to myself was not defined, and I co-opted that space for myself.

Let them constrain me until exhaustion, their actions will always be finite. In this, I have already won.


End file.
